Battle of Fort Donelson

The Battle of Fort Donelson was an American Civil War battle that was fought from 11 to 16 February 1862 at Fort Donelson in Stewart County, Tennessee.

After capturing the Confederate Fort Henry along the Tennessee River, Union general Ulysses S. Grant moved his army 12 miles overland to Fort Donelson, conducting small probing attacks from 11 to 13 February. On 14 February, Andrew Hull Foote's Union flotilla shelled the fort in hopes of destroying it, but they sustained heavy damage from the fort's water batteries. On 15 February, as the Union army surrounded the fort, the Confederate general John B. Floyd launched a surprise attack against Grant's right flank, hoping to escape to Nashville in a breakout. The attack was mostly successful, but Floyd feared for the worst and instead had his men fall back to the fort rather than push further. The next morning, Floyd and his second-in-command Gideon Johnson Pillow fled the fort with a handful of men, leaving it to Simon Bolivar Buckner to accept Grant's terms of unconditional surrender the next day. 12,392 Confederates were captured in a celebrated fist major Union victory which opened the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers to invasion in the heartland of the American South and left a third of Albert Sidney Johnson's army as prisoners. On 23 February 1862, Johnson evacuated Nashville, surrendering the important industrial center to the Union, the first Confederate state capital to fall. All of Kentucky and most of Tennessee came under Union control as a result of the capture of the forts.